Recent advances in software engineering have been facilitated by component-based software engineering techniques that encapsulate application functionality into a set of reusable software components. Software components, which are often implemented as objects, comprise a set of semantically related functions and data and may exist autonomously from other components in a computer system. Moreover, software components can produce or consume events to facilitate event-driven architectures (EDAs), which are useful for implementing user interfaces.
Software components typically provide interfaces specifying services that other components (and other application code) can utilize. Moreover, software components are “replaceable,” which means that an original component instance can be replaced with a new component instance (at design time or run-time) if the new component instance provides at least the same functionality as the original component instance.
One complication that arises during development of a component-based software system is that when a new component instance is developed to replace an original component instance, all of the components that accessed the original component instance must be modified to access the new component instance. If many components need to be modified, this modification process can involve a lot of time-consuming manual work and can also introduce errors into the system.
Hence, what is needed is a software-development system that facilitates replacing an original component instance with a new component instance without having to manually modify all of the code that accesses the original component instance.